Bones and Bourbon by Dorian Graves

[Ulysses]

Bones and Bourbon
By Dorian Graves
Ninestar Press, 2018
Four stars

I can’t remember what got me to buy this book, but it was a surprise as I read it. Fast-paced, carefully crafted, “Bones and Bourbon” is the first in what promises to be an action-packed series of highly surreal paranormal urban fantasies.

Retz Gallow is not fully human. Plus, he’s possessed by an ancient being called Nalem, and has been since he was a baby. His brother Jarrod and his father Alexander decamped when Retz was a little boy, leaving him and his mother, Ericka, on their own in small-town Washington.

Retz is a hairdresser by training, but Nalem takes him on adventures whether he wants to go or not. This time around, the bizarre arc of his travels will end in a reunion with his long-lost brother and his brother’s charmingly amoral boyfriend, Farris. Who, by the way, is a terrible driver.

There’s a lot here, and it’s very well done. It’s all a little violent for my taste, but I loved the way Graves shatters various sugar-coated mythologies related to things like fairies and unicorns. She also has a trans man as one of the central characters and does it very well. This, being the inaugural book of a series, has a lot of revelation within, and I found that quite satisfying, even though all of the questions aren’t answered, drawing us to the book that awaits us. Graves is onto something, indeed.